Gargantua and Pantagruel eBook

I will, nay, I already do repent having proposed it;
for still I must remain nettled and gravelled, and
a devil a bit I know how to get off. Well, what
say you? I’faith, I begin to smell you
out. You are not yet disposed to give me an
answer; nor I neither, by these whiskers. Yet
to give some light into the business, I’ll e’en
tell you what had been anciently foretold in the matter
by a venerable doctor, who, being moved by the spirit
in a prophetic vein, wrote a book ycleped the Prelatical
Bagpipe. What d’ye think the old fornicator
saith? Hearken, you old noddies, hearken now
or never.

The jubilee’s year, when all like
fools were shorn,
Is about thirty supernumerary.
O want of veneration! fools they seemed,
But, persevering, with long breves, at
last
No more they shall be gaping greedy fools.
For they shall shell the shrub’s
delicious fruit,
Whose flower they in the spring so much
had feared.

Now you have it, what do you make on’t?
The seer is ancient, the style laconic, the sentences
dark like those of Scotus, though they treat of matters
dark enough in themselves. The best commentators
on that good father take the jubilee after the thirtieth
to be the years that are included in this present
age till 1550 (there being but one jubilee every fifty
years). Men shall no longer be thought fools
next green peas season.

The fools, whose number, as Solomon certifies, is
infinite, shall go to pot like a parcel of mad bedlamites
as they are; and all manner of folly shall have an
end, that being also numberless, according to Avicenna,
maniae infinitae sunt species. Having been driven
back and hidden towards the centre during the rigour
of the winter, ’tis now to be seen on the surface,
and buds out like the trees. This is as plain
as a nose in a man’s face; you know it by experience;
you see it. And it was formerly found out by
that great good man Hippocrates, Aphorism Verae etenim
maniae, &c. This world therefore wisifying itself,
shall no longer dread the flower and blossoms of every
coming spring, that is, as you may piously believe,
bumper in hand and tears in eyes, in the woeful time
of Lent, which used to keep them company.

Whole cartloads of books that seemed florid, flourishing,
and flowery, gay, and gaudy as so many butterflies,
but in the main were tiresome, dull, soporiferous,
irksome, mischievous, crabbed, knotty, puzzling, and
dark as those of whining Heraclitus, as unintelligible
as the numbers of Pythagoras, that king of the bean,
according to Horace; those books, I say, have seen
their best days and shall soon come to nothing, being
delivered to the executing worms and merciless petty
chandlers; such was their destiny, and to this they
were predestinated.

In their stead beans in cod are started up; that is,
these merry and fructifying Pantagruelian books, so
much sought nowadays in expectation of the following
jubilee’s period; to the study of which writings
all people have given their minds, and accordingly
have gained the name of wise.